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8 thoughts on “Episode 27 – 26th March 2010”

Nice to hear me getting a mention on this excellent podcast, good work to all involved. Oh and I sort of agree with Reggie but the bill is still wrong, well the people getting their connections cut of with no criminal convictions bit anyway.

Yeah, I’m not persuaded by that Reggie bloke myself. We don’t let paedophiles use the internet, so think of the children and don’t steal music.

The reason that Lily Allen was laughed at for coming out against copyright infringement was that she did it by copying someone’s article on why you shouldn’t infringe copyright. That’s ironic, not uncool.

I tend to agree with Reggie. Creative artists should be able to determine the price that they want to sell their material at. Copying a CD does, in most cases, result in a reduction in the amount of money going to the artist that created it.

What annoys me about the responses to this problem so far is the “by-catch”. So, let’s make CDs uncopyable. How? Root kits from Sony, weird DRM schemes that mean I can’t listen to music I’ve paid for on my Samsung MP3 player because it’s not blessed with “plays for sure” technology (possibly the most misnamed technology ever), and so forth. I have to bring my kids’ DVD collection on holiday because I’m not supposed to rip it onto a nice, convenient, small, unscratchable, expendable SDHC card or two.

Yes, I’m probably a minority, in that I don’t take stuff unless it’s freely offered. Don’t punish me, though, for what other people are doing. And don’t punish them without due process.

My problem with that Sean, is that by using the phrase ‘their material’ you’ve implicitly accepted the notion that a file on a random persons computer belongs to the musician, and to enforce such a system of property (even if it is correct to do so) inevitably requires invasion of privacy and excessive government meddling.

Music and musicians predate copyright and recorded media. To say that rigid control of these things is needed to prevent cultural decay is pure historical ignorance.

I’m alarmed at how little regard the self-styled ‘creatives’ have for this aspect of the issue. They use the words ‘rights’ to mean ‘commercial exploitation rights’ when everyone else is using it to mean ‘human rights’.

Reggie seems to miss certain points. The reason the ORG don’t campaign for the rights of “intellectual property” holders is because there is already MASSIVE financial backing to lobby for that, pushing constantly for measures which screw the “consumer”. In fact his argument here seems to be essentially the same as the Daily Mail-esque “what about the human rights of the victim?” line. Secondly although the ISPs obviously make more money if customers aren’t disconnected, usage level of most internet connections doesn’t affect how much a customer pays, since most are charged at a flat rate. Indeed many ISPs throttle your connection speed if you use it heavily, because it affects them negatively. Yes, you could possibly get a slower connection for less money, but that additionally prevents you from using services like iPlayer or watching higher quality YouTube video (most of which is legal).
Thirdly many people DO believe in a completely unrestricted and unregulated Internet, believing the undesirable consequences will be outweighed by the positive consequences, which is the exact impetus behind Freenet.
One point further point is just the practicality of punishing those who are caught illegally downloading copyrighted material (which IS different from stealing and it is an important distinction, but not that’s not really relevant to my point). The person who the account is registered to with an ISP is not necessarily the person who committed the infringement, and I’m not sure if Reggie is agreeing with the implementation in the Digital Economy Bill, but under that subscribers would be held responsible for whatever is downloaded on their connection. Now, as a computer programmer and someone who has previously worked in technical support I can tell you only a very tiny percentage of the population is capable of securing their computer and their network properly (which is more than just using WPA2 and having some bloated anti-virus software!). There WILL be people who will reach three strikes without having done anything wrong.

If filesharers are the biggest consumers of paid media content, shutting down filesharers could theoretically lead to a reduction in the amount spent on paid content. Then we’ll see how quickly the industry lobbies to get the three-strikes withdrawn!